I’m a firm believer in blockchain and crypto but being a believer doesn’t mean I should put my common sense aside.

In 2018, I created a startup called 1Krowd to use blockchain for ticketing. I spent over 6 months thinking, tinkering and finding excuses (literally) to use blockchain for my ticketing solution. But all answers led to the same conclusion — DO NOT use blockchain. Eventually, we used facial recognition technology instead.

I was discouraged, to say the least, as I was so excited about this new Web3 technology. But please allow me to share my findings.

Wow, this was amazing news! I thought if Ticketmaster, the world’s largest ticketing company, is acquiring a blockchain startup, there must be a strong validation that blockchain is good for ticketing, right? I even had the right differentiating factor to beat UPGRADED, so I thought.

The acquisition was circa 2018 but up to now, no other news came from the startup nor Ticketmaster. In fact, their website has gone bust. One may say it was an acqui-hire. Right, so let’s check from 2018 to now to see what else Ticketmaster or their parent Live Nation has been doing with blockchain or NFT.

FanDragon is the creator of TixTo.Me — a blockchain entertainment wallet. The collaboration supposed to offer consumers access to tickets in one secure blockchain wallet. As of now, TixTo.Me and FanDragon websites no longer exist.

Here’s the news, in case another site goes bust. Credit: LedgerInsights

Another early entry into the blockchain ticketing arena is BlockParty. Based in New York, they started with the vision to transform the ticketing world with blockchain by getting rid of ticket scalpers (unscrupulous resellers) and solving counterfeit issues.

Today, their business revolves around NFT products — NFT marketplace, NFT tools and more.

GET Protocol which is based in the Netherlands is one of the pioneers in blockchain ticketing. They raised an ICO and begin issuing blockchain-stored tickets for small events in Amsterdam since 2017/18.

As of now, they have moved from small to medium-sized events and changed their main business model from a ticketing marketplace to white-label enterprise solution. Which begs the question, why? Running a ticketing marketplace like Ticketmaster is far more lucrative than white-labeling (aka OEM). Otherwise, FAAMG (FB, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google) would have taken the white path. Believe me, I’ve done both in my past startups.

I never purchased a ticket from GET Protocol but based on my research, they sell tickets of other events via partnerships, meaning not all tickets sold are powered by GET Protocol.

They have also moved to using NFT which I think is more fitting for tickets. They could help permanently store customers’ tickets on chain which usually have some novelty value. I know I kept some of my old concert tickets somewhere. But the caveat is some tickets come with names printed on them so event organizers should be privacy-sensitive over this.

One of the biggest issues with blockchain ticketing is gas fee. I don’t think I need to elaborate much on this. Imagine the process from buying to using a ticket. There would be at least three transactions — purchasing, scanning at the door and burning (to prevent reuse).

We can consider moving things off-chain. But if so, why do we use blockchain in the first place?

Imagine a concert is about to happen at a stadium with 50,000 tickets sold out. During the 2 hours prior to the event, we’ll have thousands of people rushing through a dozen of gates with dozens of tickets being scanned every second, literally! I’ve yet to witness firsthand the speed of a blockchain that can achieve high enough TPS (transactions per second) for this.

While debugging and testing my smart contracts, I often need to wait for at least four seconds for a transaction to be validated. I know many blockchain networks claim to do TPS in the tens of thousands but most are theoretical. And still, this is shared TPS with the rest of the world. Could parallel chains (aka sidechains) or sharding solve this issue? We’ve yet to find out.

Some suggested using blockchain to stop ticket scalping. But do you know that even artists are reselling their own concert tickets? Because they have all the rights to do so. It’s their concert anyway.

If we’d to stop reselling via smart contract, we’d make life difficult for everyone to resell, including the artists. I reckon they’d say no to that.

Actually, ticket reselling isn’t entirely a bad thing. It is only bad if the pricing is not regulated and it doesn’t give back to the artists or organizers. This is why most large events like the Olympics and major sports clubs have their own dedicated ticket reselling sites.

When you have 50,000 people crowding a relatively small space like a stadium, you’ll absolutely be bound to have network congestion. This includes cellphone signal connectivity and WiFi. Wait, how many stadiums in the world actually have sufficient WiFi coverage? Even if they do, economic sense dictates that you’d be sharing it with the public which would add to your ticketing woes.

This is the very reason why ticket scanning devices usually have a “delay mode” that doesn’t actually verify the tickets it scanned if there’s a network congestion. This would defeat the purpose of having blockchain since the glorified use case is supposedly the ability to fight counterfeits.

Beyond the major issues, we have other minor but yet important problems to resolve. How do we replace a lost or canceled ticket since it’s already minted in the blockchain? Burning would require gas fees. And the same goes for refunds.

And the biggest issue of them all is fighting counterfeits. Someone can easily forge a new blockchain ticket to verify that a fake ticket is genuine. Blockchain, after all, is a public chain thus anyone could create their own ticketing smart contract and mint their own tickets.

One might suggest that we can use a private or permissioned blockchain. Again, if it’s private wouldn’t a centralized architecture be better and cheaper?

The best use case that we could derive from blockchain is probably storing your ticket stubs as NFTs. There’re a few initiatives along this use such as by LiveNation. Ticket HODLers might hope that this memorabilia would fetch higher value at a later stage, especially when the artist at the concert they went to has passed on.

Event organizers could also create one-of-a-kind NFT tickets for one particular event to add more value to the NFTs. However, they would still face the same inherent issues such as ticket cancelation (loss of ownership and the cost of ticket burning on-chain), reselling and privacy.

My first boss taught me this useful proverb — don’t use a sledgehammer to kill an ant. It seems that the relationship between ticketing and blockchain is always marred with troubles.

We can all agree that blockchain is still evolving and until there’s a compelling reason to have tickets on chain, I’d try to keep them apart.

If you found a better way to fuse them together, I’m all ears. Please leave it in the comments below.